TWO STUDIES CITE CHILD SEX ABUSE BY 4% OF PRIESTS

Two long-awaited studies have found that the Roman Catholic Church suffered an epidemic of child sexual abuse that involved at least 4 percent of priests over 52 years and peaked with the ordination class of 1970, in which one of every 10 priests was eventually accused of abuse.

The human toll amounted to 10,667 children allegedly victimized by 4,392 priests from 1950 to 2002, but the studies caution that even these numbers represent an undercount. The totals depend on self-reporting by American bishops, the studies note, and many victims have never come forward out of fear or shame.

The studies were commissioned by the American Catholic bishops in 2002 in response to accusations of a massive episcopal cover-up of sexual abuse by priests. They will undoubtedly provide fodder for controversies between left and right in the church about issues like homosexuality in the priesthood and whether the celibacy requirement for priests should be revoked.

These reports provide the most comprehensive examination ever of child sexual abusers in any institution, their authors said, so it is not possible yet to determine whether Catholic priests are more prone to molest children than any other professionals who work with youngsters.

''We wouldn't go near that because we just don't know,'' said William Burleigh, chairman of the board of the E. W. Scripps Company and a member of the group that prepared the report on the causes of the crisis.

One report is a data-driven study conducted by a group of academics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City. They sent surveys to dioceses and religious orders asking for details about the accused priests, their victims and the church's response, and compiled their data from the responses.

They said that 97 percent of the dioceses filled out the surveys.

Among other things, the John Jay survey found that the church spent more than $572 million on lawyers' fees, settlements and therapy for victims and treatment for the priests. But the report said the figure was prematurely low.

Researchers said in an interview that a more accurate total was about three-quarters of a billion dollars, because the $572 million did not include several recent settlements, like the $85 million paid to victims by the Archdiocese of Boston and because 14 percent of dioceses and religious orders provided none of the financial information requested by the researchers.

The other report, on the causes and context of the crisis, was written by a team of prominent Catholic lawyers, judges, businesspeople and other professionals whom the bishops had appointed to a national review board.

They reached their conclusions after interviewing 85 bishops and cardinals, Vatican officials, experts and a handful of victims, and after seeing the data from the John Jay researchers. Those interviewed were promised that their comments would not be attributed, which resulted in great candor, the report said.

Their report, 145 pages and covered in purple to signify atonement, dissects the culture in Catholic seminaries and chanceries that they say tolerated moral laxity and a gay subculture. They make recommendations for reform, but no judgments on whether church doctrine or rules need to be changed.

''The problem facing the church was not caused by church doctrine, and the solution does not lie in questioning doctrine,'' the review board's report said.

The reports were prepared for release at a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Friday morning. The New York Times had obtained an embargoed copy, but the embargo was broken when the Diocese of Yakima, Wash., disclosed the results in a press release on Thursday night, and it was also picked up by The Associated Press wire.

Even the authors of the two reports do not agree on the meaning of the findings. The review board's report mentions that more than 80 percent of the abuse at issue was of a homosexual nature. The report theorizes that the problem reflects a cohort of gay priests, based on their figures that the percentage of male victims rose from 64 percent in the 1950's, to 76 percent in the 1960's and 86 percent in the 1980's.

''We do not seek to place the blame for the sexual abuse crisis on the presence of homosexual individuals in the priesthood as there are many chaste and holy homosexual priests who are faithful to their vows of celibacy,'' the report said. ''However, we must call attention to the homosexual behavior that characterized the vast majority of the cases of abuse observed in recent decades.''

But the John Jay researchers differed, saying in an interview that they have no data on sexual orientation of the perpetrators and that the more likely explanation is that sexual abuse is a crime of opportunity and priests had more unfettered access to teenage boys than to teenage girls.

Karen Terry, an associate professor at John Jay who was the reports principal investigator, said, ''We don't know if that's because of homosexual orientation or because that's who they had access to.''

James Levine, dean of graduate studies and research at John Jay, who coordinated the study, likened the phenomenon to male prisoners who have sex with men, not because they are gay, but because that is who they have access to.

The report on the causes and context of the crisis assigns the blame to everyone from the bishops who turned their backs on victims and protected their priests, to the lawyers who advised the bishops and the psychiatric professionals -- most of them in Catholic-run institutions -- who had a vested interest in claiming that they had rehabilitated abusive priests.

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The John Jay findings rebut the notion advanced by some church officials that many accused priests had merely given a youngster an ambiguous pat that was misconstrued or made an inappropriate remark. The report found that none of the priests were accused of only verbal abuse or pornography and only 3 percent of the acts included only touching over the victim's clothes.

Instead, the researchers say they were surprised at the high rate of serious offenses: in 27 percent of the cases the cleric performed oral sex on the child; in 25 percent of the cases the cleric succeeded in or tried to penetrate the child with his penis.

Consistent with previous reports, a small group of multiple offenders appears to be responsible for an inordinate amount of the abuse. The John Jay study found that 149 priests who had more than 10 accusations of abuse were responsible for abusing 2,960 victims or 27 percent of all the accusations. The majority, 56 percent of the accused priests, had only one accusation against them.

Both reports are highly critical of the bishops and church officials, and the Review Board's report singles out a few by name. Among them are Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who resigned his post as archbishop of Boston as a result of the scandal; Cardinal Edward M. Egan of New York for failing in his former post as bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., to remove a priest with a developing pattern of accusations; and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles for resisting grand jury subpoenas that sought church files on accused priests.

The review board's report on the causes of the crisis said that board members could not find a single expression of outrage in church correspondence from a supervising bishop about any priest that the bishops knew had been accused of abuse.

The board's report said there must be consequences for bishops, seminary administrators and church leaders, but it did not recommend any particular action.

The review board members said their interviews with Vatican officials suggested that the church in Rome did not comprehend the seriousness of the crisis and had little understanding of the seriousness of sexual abuse. Among those interviewed was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who famously remarked at the height of the American scandal that fewer than 1 percent of priests were abusers.

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said: ''We are a tad closer to the truth. The only safe assumption is we're still not seeing or hearing the whole picture.''

As for why so few priests were disciplined, the review board says that besides bishops who were oblivious, insensitive or protective of their priests, the church's canon laws were partly to blame. The canons favored the accused and made it very hard for bishops to remove men from the priesthood, the board's report said. But the report also notes that the bishops did not make use of the avenues in canon law available to them to discipline the priests.

The review board report said that among those they interviewed ''some witnesses likened the clerical culture to a feudal or military culture and said that priests and bishops who rocked the boat were less likely to advance.''

The John Jay researchers found that only 14 percent of the priests accused of abuse were reported to the police by their bishops. The rest were never reported, never investigated. Ninety-five percent were never charged with a crime. Of the 217 priests charged, 138 were convicted.

But both reports also suggest that the bishops and religious orders, who supply one-third of the nations priests and many of which also cooperated with the John Jay survey, were unaware of how extensive the problem was until very recently.

One-third of all accusations were reported in 2002-2003, after the scandal erupted in the Boston Archdiocese with news reports about two priests who were serial pedophiles. Two-thirds of the accusations were reported since 1993, the John Jay report found.

The John Jay report found that the problem did not occur only in large archdioceses or those where cases have already become public. Priests were accused of abuse in more than 95 percent of dioceses and about 60 percent of religious orders. Of the 195 dioceses and Eastern rite eparchies that responded to the survey, only seven reported that none of their priests had been accused of abuse.

Even these figures do not provide the full picture, said Michele Galietta, an assistant professor of psychology at John Jay who worked on the report.

''Every kind of sex crime is under-reported.,'' Ms. Galietta said. ''This should not be regarded as the full extent of the problem.''

Correction: March 5, 2004, Friday A front-page article in some copies on Friday about two studies on sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests misstated the scope of the one by John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and misstated its finding about the sources of reports to the police. The study compiled data only; it was not critical of church officials. It found that 14 percent of priests accused of abuse were reported to the police by victims, not by bishops.